Ever get the feeling you woke up on the wrong planet, somebody stole your spaceship, and it’s a long walk home?
That’s how I felt after UFC 115 rolled through Vancouver, landed several blows to our civic psyche, then left, vowing to return.
UFC, for the uninitiated, is short for Ultimate Fighting Championship, and 115 is the 115th event. Since UFC 1 in 1993, fighters skilled in a mix of martial arts — including jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and boxing — have been beating the crap out of each other in front of increasingly larger crowds all across North America.
What exactly is going on here? If you don’t have a 20-year-old son who looks like a Brazilian gangster, you may have heard about UFC, but don’t really know what it’s about. Let me just say, ignorance is no defence.
When Sen. John McCain, the man who will go down in history as Sarah Palin’s enabler, first encountered UFC, he called it “human cockfighting.” Back then, the tag line was: “There are no rules.” Now there are rules. You can no longer, for example, break your opponent’s fingers, gouge his eyes out or “kick the head of a grounded opponent.” You can, of course, continue to smash him in the face with your fists even though he’s down and incapacitated.
After UFC 115, the emergency ward at Vancouver General looked like a MASH unit after a bad day on the battlefield. At least five of the combatants were hospitalized, with broken arms, hands, feet, and noses.
Here’s how one sportswriter, Ian MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun, described the beating absorbed by Rory MacDonald, a 20-year-old who looks like a Brazilian gangster but is just a nice kid (really!) from Kelowna: “Condit’s right arm worked like a piston as he efficiently cracked Rory’s face and head over and over and over and over.”
And then: “At that stage, after more than three minutes of sustained beating, Rory’s defence consisted almost entirely of lolling his head from one side to another. But the cracks continued, one after another.”
And then: “…referee Kevin Dornan decided enough was enough and stopped the slaughter. The crowd booed his judgment.”
Under any other circumstances, this behaviour would be called by its real name: Aggravated assault. When something like this happens at the rink, the cops investigate. At UFC, while the guy’s bleeding and unconscious, there’s just enough time to go for another beer.
You think boxing was bad? This is boxing on crack.
Count me out. Now, where can I catch the space taxi?
Paul Sullivan is a Vancouver-based journalist and owner of Sullivan Media Consulting;
vancouverletters@metronews.ca.
